Page 21 of Spread Me

Saskia sits on the floor of Kinsey’s bedroom, her legs crossed. She’s rolling joints for Jacques, who is giving up alcohol for a week to prove a point to Mads. Saskia doesn’t smoke, but she has deft hands and loves repetitive tasks, so there are twenty neat, compact joints in a row on the floor in front of her.

“Vareniki and pelmeni are different,”

she’s explaining. Kinsey is only half listening, but that doesn’t deter Saskia.

“With vareniki you cook the filling ahead of time. Pelmeni, you fill raw. It’s a completely different vibe.”

“Right.”

Kinsey adds another line to the email she’s drafting to TQI, asking for an increased grocery budget. She deletes the line, then puts it back in.

“And pelmeni is the sweet one?”

“Never,”

Saskia says vehemently.

“You don’t listen, Kinsey. That one is never sweet.”

She runs her tongue along the edge of a rolling paper.

“I’ll make them for you and you’ll understand. Can we get ground pork? Will TQI let us have that?”

Kinsey considers.

“I think so? But you should talk to Nkrumah, I think she doesn’t do pork.”

“Beef,”

Saskia says.

“She had a pet cow when she was young. But either way, I could do a mushroom filling. What you don’t understand is that it’s really all about the wrapper. You have to roll it so thin…”

She keeps going. Her words wash over Kinsey like puffs of smoke. She describes stewing sweet spiced cherries, mixing sour cream with horseradish, chopping dunes of dill and toasting walnuts. She rolls joints until she’s gone through Domino’s entire stash of rolling papers. The floral sap-smell of decent weed fills the room.

It takes Kinsey an hour to write the email to TQI. She asks for special budgetary allowances for cherries and ground pork. Saskia is there the entire time. It’s only the next morning that Kinsey stops to consider that Saskia was keeping her company, so she didn’t have to work alone.

***

Kinsey wakes up gently. She doesn’t open her eyes, doesn’t move her body. She’s warm. It’s quiet. Her skull hisses with the static noise of a not-quite-hangover, the impact of whiskey and panic gentled by an enormous amount of water and the gravity of deep sleep. She can feel the worse that might have been, but miraculously, there’s no headache waiting to reveal itself—there’s only the soft velvet cushion of deep exhaustion, waiting for her to sink into it.

As she pushes her face into her pillow, Kinsey is struck by the kind of wisdom that lives on the cusp of unconsciousness, the kind of thought that she won’t be able to grasp when she’s fully awake. Exhaustion, she realizes, is only unpleasant when one has to resist it. But when succumbing is an option—when everything is still and quiet and there’s no reason to push the strong arms of sleep away—exhaustion is ecstasy.

A solid band of pressure at her midsection stops her from rolling onto her stomach. She lets her hands drift toward her stomach, fingers spider-walking over the blankets to try to find whatever tangle in them has got her stuck in place. But where she’d expect to find a thick twist of fabric, her hands instead encounter warm, well-muscled flesh.

Her eyes snap open. On a deep breath, Kinsey arches her back. Her spine curls, her ribs expand, and she feels herself pressing into the soft wall of a chest. Mads, she thinks, connecting the sensation with the smell of someone else’s sweat on the pillow, fuzzy memories of the night before. She’s in Mads’s bed. She’s in Mads’s arms.

Their belly fits perfectly into the small of her back. As the tide of sleep pulls away from her brain, it leaves recognizable sensations behind: warm breath on the back of her neck, pressure on the back of her head where Mads’s forehead must be pressed into her hair. They’re wrapped around her like a tongue cupping a sip of soup.

It’s nice.

Enjoying this moment is a new experience for Kinsey. She doesn’t want to surge away from Mads, like she normally would. Their skin against hers isn’t a clammy smothering hell. It reminds her of the first time she enjoyed wine, when the sour burn she’d always hated transmuted itself into something warm and complex and really very pleasant.

Kinsey is wearing only her shirt and underwear, a state of undress that she’s starting to associate with Mads. Mads, as far as she can tell, is in their underwear and nothing else. She doesn’t remember falling asleep here, but she does have a vague recollection of pulling her bra off through one shirtsleeve, announcing herself the champion of locker-room modesty.

It’s pleasant, being half-undressed next to Mads. Maybe there will be embarrassment later. That doesn’t matter. “Later”

is a distant shoreline.

She swims her bare legs through the blankets, searching for theirs, wanting to feel the closeness of them along the entire length of her body. She only finds a thin layer of grit between the sheets. They shift in their sleep, tighten their grip around her. She hears a soft murmur from just behind one of her ears, goes still to try to keep from waking them. Once they seem settled, she sends her legs searching again.

This time, she does find something. Her foot meets something solid, something that’s tangled up in the blankets. She nudges her way past fabric, searching Mads out, her mind already sinking back into sleep. Her ankle slides between two strong, heavy legs, her foot sliding along the arch of Mads’s foot, her knee notching in over theirs.

Mads shifts behind her, nuzzles their face into the back of her hair. They make a strange, wet snuffling sound. It’s enough to fully banish the promise of sleep, and with no small amount of regret, she accepts that she’s awake. Whatever that sound was, it’s more important than the deep black bliss of unconsciousness.

“You okay?”

she whispers.

They don’t reply.

“Hey,”

she says softly, lacing her fingers through theirs and squeezing their hand where it rests over her belly. Memories of the day before are coming into full focus in her mind. Mads had stopped crying when they’d started drinking. Maybe sobriety is bringing the tears back to them.

“It’s okay. We’ll figure something out. Nkrumah’s probably not even awake yet, we’d have heard her thumping around. We’ve got time. Yeah?”

They still don’t say anything. Their arms are tight around her, and they sniff into the back of her hair again. They sound deeply congested. She wonders briefly how long they were crying before she woke up, how she didn’t notice sooner.

“Mads? Here, let me—”

She pulls away. Mads clings to her, tries to prevent her from turning over in the bed, but she extracts herself from their arms.

“I don’t even remember falling asleep,”

she says as she stretches to reach for the bedside lamp.

“When did we turn the lights off?”

There’s no answer. Kinsey turns the lamp on, blinks briefly in the light. Then she turns over to look Mads in the eyes.

But there are no eyes to meet.

It takes Kinsey a second to understand what she’s seeing: curled up between her and the wall, half-tangled in the blankets, is the specimen from the desert. Its head rests on Mads’s pillow, a soft spill of sand from one of the eye sockets scattered across the sheets. Its neck vanishes into a dune of bedding.

But Kinsey knows what she felt—fingers, toes, the silk of bare skin against hers. None of that belonged to the specimen. None of that was wrapped around her.

She whips the bedsheets back and sees the rest.

It’s Mads. Mads’s arms, Mads’s legs, Mads’s belly. It’s their body—unmistakable, underwear-clad, soft with sleep. But it stops at the shoulders, becoming something else. The scattered hair that normally peppers Mads’s chest is thick now, thick and thicker as it goes up toward a furred neck. The rest of them is gone, replaced by the head of the thing they found in the desert. No soft jaw, no warm eyes, no thick curls.

That, Kinsey understands, is the snuffling she heard: it was the blunt wet coyote-nose of the specimen, breathing into her hair.

Mads is gone. It has devoured them. It has destroyed them. It has replaced them.

Kinsey stumbles backward. The creature in the bed lunges after her. It rises to Mads’s knees, reaches toward her with Mads’s hand, clutches at her shoulder with Mads’s fingers. It draws a rattling breath, sucking air down what sounds like half a windpipe. The breath catches on a chain of dry coughs—the creature doubles over and sand drops out of its open mouth like a broken hourglass, pat-patting onto the bedsheets with every lung-cracking heave.

Kinsey doesn’t wait to see if the creature will catch its breath. She slips off the edge of the bed. She lands on the pile of discarded clothes and scrambles crabwise for the door.

The creature dives after her. It stretches one of Mads’s long muscular arms toward her. Kinsey jerks her legs back but she isn’t fast enough—fingers wrap around her ankle, stronger than Mads’s grip ever could have been. It jerks her back toward the bed. Her ass slides along the floor, the carpet shearing a layer of skin off the backs of her bare thighs. For a gut-clenching instant she feels the joint creak loose of the socket as the creature hauls her by the ankle.

Pain and fear yank a scream out of her—and to her shock, at the sound of her screaming, the creature lets go.

“Wait,”

the specimen says. It speaks with a rasping, cracked version of Mads’s voice.

“Don’t run, Kinsey, please just let me explain!”

“Explain what?!”

Kinsey yells.

“Don’t come near me! What did you do to Mads?”

“Mads is gone,”

the specimen explains. It blinks at her—one eye socket still full of packed sand, the other half-hollow, revealing a flash of white bone.

“But look, it’s okay! I talked with Domino and Saskia—”

“What?”

For a moment—just an instant—she hopes wildly that maybe the real Domino and Saskia are still alive somewhere, cocooned in silk or buried in tunnels or sealed into the walls, somewhere she can track them down, somewhere she can save them—

“Isn’t that what you called those versions of me? Domino, the me with the…”

It gestures to its armpit.

“And Saskia, the one I did a little better with. Isn’t that what you named those versions?”

Kinsey shakes her head, covers her mouth with both hands. “No,”

she moans.

“No, no, no, what do you mean you talked to them, what—”

“They told me how things went when they tried to, you know. Connect with you,”

the specimen says. The euphemism is somehow a thousand times worse than if it had just said when they tried to fuck you.

“And we figured out what you really want. It’s this, right?”

It pulls itself to its knees and turns on all fours to face her. It cocks one ear on the coyote-head, sits back on its knees like a dog settling onto its haunches.

“It’s everything you want. A beautiful body, just like the one on Mads. And the mystery and interest of a novel specimen, just like the body you dug up in the desert. None of the responsibility and sentiment of a human mind,”

it adds proudly, running a hand over its own sleek head.

“But all the landscape of a human body.”

Its hand drops, skims over Mads’s barrel chest and full belly. It dips the hand under the waistband of its boxer briefs.

“Stop,”

Kinsey breathes. She looks away—but then, unable to help herself, she glances back. Under the thin fabric, Mads’s hand is working rhythmically at their crotch. “Stop!”

The hand stills. The coyote-mouth drops open, revealing small, pointed teeth.

“What’s wrong?”

Mads’s voice says from somewhere behind those teeth. It’s a near-perfect imitation now, all the rough edges nearly gone.

“You have to stop this. All of this,”

Kinsey says. Her eyes fill with desperate tears.

“You can’t keep killing my colleagues—my friends. Please. You can’t keep killing them. I’m—I’m begging you.”

The specimen takes a moment to answer. “Okay,”

it says at last.

“But … do you have any friends left?”

“Nkrumah. And Jacques,”

she says without hesitation.

“It’s not too late for them, is it?”

It doesn’t answer.

“Is it?!”

The specimen’s head tilts to one side, considering. Then, after a moment, its hand starts to slowly shift between its legs again.

“Hard to say,”

it says in a low purr.

“How bad do you want to know?”

Kinsey looks away, swallows hard around the painful lump in her throat. The part of her that wants the virus is drowned beneath the horror of watching this creature violate what it’s made of her friend’s body. The nausea that rises in her is an immense relief. Finally, finally, she can feel something as simple as disgust.

“This isn’t a game,”

she says weakly. The thing that looks like Mads is panting now, breathless.

“I’m not bargaining with you. Just tell me if they’re still alive. Please.”

The creature lets out a groan. Kinsey doesn’t wait to see if it’s a groan of frustration or of satisfaction. She forces herself to her feet and stumbles on half-numb legs through the door, yelling Nkrumah’s name.

She prays there’s anyone left at the station who can hear her.